


The Price of Memory

by Kartaylir



Category: Divinity: Original Sin (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Canon-Typical Cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-03 11:48:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19463356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kartaylir/pseuds/Kartaylir
Summary: Sebille reflects on her past after a conversation with the seer Saheila.





	The Price of Memory

_Reaper's Coast_

* * *

You pick your way around the chunks of rabbit floating in the stew. Pull out bits of carrot and onion. Even the too-large fragments of garlic. Let the broth drip back into the bowl as if even that might carry the weight of memories.

Already you've eaten the history of too many lives lost. The taste of the void-touched settling as deep rot in the back of your thoughts and throat. You'd not expected the ache of betrayal that you found among it, something ancient and yet so familiar. It's what you feel when you gaze at Ifan, what you felt when you stared into Hannag's face and asked for counsel.

And of course it's Ifan who notices your disinterest toward your stew. He hands you another bowl, and this one is filled to the brim with pieces of vegetables. The thin drippings of the broth that pool beneath them are the only traces it holds of meat.

"Don't tempt me to etch another name on my skin," you say. But you don't manage a snarl with the words. Can't summon the old, bitter rage. 

He is kind enough to flinch from you nonetheless. The gesture just slow enough to mark it as some generous mask, or perhaps just his own deserved guilt.

You're quick to slink back out the firelight with your bowl, then. To skulk in the darkness as you attempt to eat indistinct chunks of potato and carrot. Your spoon crushes food beneath it, cuts into the side of the bowl as Saheila's words haunt you. But the anger is still held back beneath the press of some many deaths, so many small betrayals. You've tasted pilgrims and Magisters alike. Eaten of thieves and farmers, the forgotten dead bleeding upon your lips until it seems they'll drown out what remains of you. 

If you could remember, maybe you'd know if this was why you ran. Why you were caught and scarred rather than gorging on memories beneath the Mother Tree's roots. It's all lost behind a shadowed lizard's face, and even the tale Saheila told you cannot anchor you beneath memory's waves. And yet your sense of foreboding grows ever stronger.

So you run your needle across the scar on your cheek. Across the names of dead Scions cut into your arm. And you cannot help but wonder if it would kill the Mother Tree as easily as it might kill all others who've sought to remake you.


End file.
